It's supposed to give you income so that you quickly catch up to the very steep curve (the difficulty has been mitigated a bit after a few versions though). There are supposed to be ships that recover the goods once a freighter dies, but sometimes they don't make it. It's also supposed to make piracy a bit more interesting since there is *actual* loot inside freighters. I might change from Korolov crates to something less valuable next update though.

What about having a squad of ships salvage and/or destroy the wrecks in eridani and other systems? though don't make them dirt slow like the salvager nomads so that if you want to loot something you have to race to get it.

RPC wrote:I was thinking about that too, but I don't want them to be as hated as the vanilla salvagers

I thought about that over in the economics thread. Short version: the salvagers don't provide any benefit to the player (they don't even scuttle/mark-as-empty the wrecks they salvage), but simply leech loot--with perfect efficiency, I might add--and sit on it.

No wonder they're hated.

Having stations with a commodity exchange send out a ship to loot wrecks, scuttle them when emptied, and sell the proceeds at the station's exchange, by comparison, would at least leave the loot available. If the ships didn't necessarily know when a new wreck happened nor precisely where it was, that would help too.

Hypothetical: Port Harcourt, 50 ls from the Lots-Of-Wrecks Stargate with a clear LOS there, can detect a battle and sends out a Borer to grab what it can about 60 seconds after the fight's over. The Commonwealth Station, a few light-minutes away, might send a gunship & freighter as soon as a fleeing ship arrives, but by then the Borer (and hopefully the player) should have picked over the area.

RPC wrote:I was thinking about that too, but I don't want them to be as hated as the vanilla salvagers

I don't think so, the reason why salvager nomads are so hated is because of everything KA101 said in the above post plus the fact that salvagers appear in the first batch of systems in new beyond, which is the only part of the game where money is a real concern to the player and looting things is a large part of early game income. Since players get pampered with goodies from all the battles in dynamic systems anyone concerned with the difficulty level of this mod should like these salvage ships if you decide to implement them.

KA101 wrote:
Having stations with a commodity exchange send out a ship to loot wrecks, scuttle them when emptied, and sell the proceeds at the station's exchange, by comparison, would at least leave the loot available. If the ships didn't necessarily know when a new wreck happened nor precisely where it was, that would help too.

Hypothetical: Port Harcourt, 50 ls from the Lots-Of-Wrecks Stargate with a clear LOS there, can detect a battle and sends out a Borer to grab what it can about 60 seconds after the fight's over. The Commonwealth Station, a few light-minutes away, might send a gunship & freighter as soon as a fleeing ship arrives, but by then the Borer (and hopefully the player) should have picked over the area.

I really like this idea , i think a modified version of the code used to order commonwealth traffic to loot and scuttle nearby wrecks could make this possible, though i have no idea how the 'go out and loot only when the firefight is over' could be implemented in code.

Well....
The problem is that the loot these freighters have is:
- Pretty valuable
- In large amounts
- Is persistent

Personally (others may disagree) I think that wandering freighters should not usually carry any goods above the "level" of the system they're currently in. And stuff like Korolov containers and high grade ores shouldn't start appearing routinely until past the Sung systems.

Now I get that all this loot is supposed to give you a leg up etc. But it is (imho) far too much and makes it very easy to buy up a set of rare gear and plough though the next few systems with little trouble.

Looting NPCs feeding an exchange of some kind is pretty good idea, but you'd still need to tone down the value and quantity of goods (or at least vastly up the rarity of these expensive loot items).

I absolutely love how the stations are re-built though, and how virtually everything has an escort.

Only problem with putting Korolov containers out past Sung space is that I've never seen a Korolov station past St. Kats, and IME Korolov's lore doesn't clearly state that they do multi-system escorts or shipping.

Begs the question of who/why is hauling the containers through what ought to be the most secured part of Commonwealth territory: "How are the containers getting here?"

Apart from that, I've never actually tried DySys so I really shouldn't comment.

KA101 wrote:Having stations with a commodity exchange send out a ship to loot wrecks, scuttle them when emptied, and sell the proceeds at the station's exchange, by comparison, would at least leave the loot available. If the ships didn't necessarily know when a new wreck happened nor precisely where it was, that would help too.

YES. Great idea, now to find out the code to make it happen >.>

pip wrote:Personally (others may disagree) I think that wandering freighters should not usually carry any goods above the "level" of the system they're currently in. And stuff like Korolov containers and high grade ores shouldn't start appearing routinely until past the Sung systems.

Another good idea. I'll mess with some spawn tables so that players get level appropriate items.

Would anybody be interested in CSCs selling salvaged items (like in KA101's suggestion?) or trading for essentials like medkits, autodocs, etc?

Maybe bringing in Korolov crates could increase Korolov rank, or bring up a screen where the stationmaster rewards then for their honesty.

Another idea: if players get caught selling Korolov crates it'll increase their crime level (since players aren't supposed to have that unless they're escorting).
One way to prevent this would be to turn them in to Korolov or to CW stations. This would mean that Korolov crates become a (semi) Black Market item, since IIRC corporate stations might still take them. If not, I'll make it so that the restaurant and ice farms accept them.

KA101 wrote:Only problem with putting Korolov containers out past Sung space is that I've never seen a Korolov station past St. Kats, and IME Korolov's lore doesn't clearly state that they do multi-system escorts or shipping.

I've seen freighters (one of the militia missions is to escort a "lost" superfreighter) past St. Kats, and I've always wondered what they were doing out there. Resupply maybe? Either way, I wanted to fill in the gap by putting something in there, but probably shouldn't have made Korolov containers *that* accessible >.<

+1 for having stations send ships to salvage wrecks within a certqin radius of themselves and selling the loot (Yes go CSC marketcenter!)

I'd also like the possibility of being able to filter single items out of being picked by the rotolooter (This item will be a massvie bloatware before long), in exchange increase it's power consumption. For example: I want to loot all items, except for korolov shipping containers, and illegal items >> use two menus, the cargo by catagory menu, and PM912's godmode item fabrication menu to filter groups of items, or single items respectively.

I'll have to increase the difficulty again, didn't the destruction of an urak mine warrant the wrath of 10 urak destroyers at some point?
much fun!

KA101 wrote:Only problem with putting Korolov containers out past Sung space is that I've never seen a Korolov station past St. Kats, and IME Korolov's lore doesn't clearly state that they do multi-system escorts or shipping.

I've seen freighters (one of the militia missions is to escort a "lost" superfreighter) past St. Kats, and I've always wondered what they were doing out there. Resupply maybe? Either way, I wanted to fill in the gap by putting something in there, but probably shouldn't have made Korolov containers *that* accessible >.<

True; I'm not sure where the average player (!= modder/code-reader) would find out that any given Terran freighter should be presumed to belong to Korolov. The Fleet brings in superfreighters as well, so I wouldn't presume that the superfreighter-in-distress off on the edge of the system got off-course from a Korolov run.

(Basically, no real objection. Extra lore would help though: having a Korolov/rumor/whatever alluding to Korolov sponsoring freighters out past St. Kats would suffice.)

True; I'm not sure where the average player (!= modder/code-reader) would find out that any given Terran freighter should be presumed to belong to Korolov. The Fleet brings in superfreighters as well, so I wouldn't presume that the superfreighter-in-distress off on the edge of the system got off-course from a Korolov run.

(Basically, no real objection. Extra lore would help though: having a Korolov/rumor/whatever alluding to Korolov sponsoring freighters out past St. Kats would suffice.)

I always assumed that the militia fortress mission freighters belonged to the militia and not korolov (I still find it infuriating though because the badly equipped freighters out there are one of the hardest missions for me: something I can't remedy with preparedness.)

RPC wrote:
Maybe bringing in Korolov crates could increase Korolov rank, or bring up a screen where the stationmaster rewards then for their honesty.

Turning in crates to commonwealth stations for a small reward is a fine idea.

Another idea: if players get caught selling Korolov crates it'll increase their crime level (since players aren't supposed to have that unless they're escorting).
One way to prevent this would be to turn them in to Korolov or to CW stations. This would mean that Korolov crates become a (semi) Black Market item, since IIRC corporate stations might still take them. If not, I'll make it so that the restaurant and ice farms accept them.

This seems like it could be quite interesting, especially if selling "marked" goods can eventually lower your rep to the point where people shoot at you.

I've seen freighters (one of the militia missions is to escort a "lost" superfreighter) past St. Kats, and I've always wondered what they were doing out there. Resupply maybe? Either way, I wanted to fill in the gap by putting something in there, but probably shouldn't have made Korolov containers *that* accessible >.<

I always thought the "lost" superfreighters were just on thier way to/from somewhere like the manufacturing plants or Taikon labs, ran into trouble and had to make a beeline for the nearest safe area ie: Commonwealth fort.

Another possibility is to make the containers a really really rare find but otherwise leave them alone, and have most of the ships carrying level appropriate random items. This way you'll see more variety in goods being carried around so it looks more like "stuff" is going on.

RPC wrote:
Another possibility is to make the containers a really really rare find but otherwise leave them alone, and have most of the ships carrying level appropriate random items. This way you'll see more variety in goods being carried around so it looks more like "stuff" is going on.

I've always seen militia-freighters coming from the outer areas of the system. No idea how they got lost or out that far, but whatever. (And yes, escorting them being the only mission for militia Majors gets really old.)